Motivation Monday – My Happy Place

Its coming back, and not just my insanity, its my tri tan!

Saturday was a great time out at Lake Pflugerville! Lake Pf is the best place to train and it’s nice to be getting back there – it’s my happy place. My motivation that day was to put it all together, but backwards. So first we ran 10 miles, then we biked 9 miles in the wind, and then tested out our wetsuits with a short 200m super cold and choppy swim (it just wasn’t safe to continue).

I got to see a bunch of other people out there exercising or training. There was one older guy with 2 knee braces and a jacks generic hat, he was booking it around the path and waved and said hi every lap. There were families and a group of dog walkers. A few cross country kids that were smoking everyone. It was a great day to be at our beloved Pflug.

The weather was great besides the crazy wind and the cold start, and it just made me excited to continue training, because I know I get to spend most of the spring and summer at that lake.

Also Leah got me the coolest new t-shirt for my birthday last week.  I got to point to it and use it as an excuse why I couldn’t do something today!

I hope you all can take something from your weekend and use it to help you get in the great workouts and training you need this week.

Question of the day: what is your happy place?

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Motivation (Tuesday) – On Progress and Inches

First, a note – March always gets all crazy-pants up in here due to birthdays and good weather and the world coming alive again, so we owe y’all some catchup training and food posts.  They’re happening – I promise!

Second – onto motivations!

fiber

Right now, here’s a summary on how I feel about everything in my triathlon world:

Swimming – YAY!

Running – Yay!

Biking – Yay.

Nutrition/Body Composition: Booooooooo.

I’ve been trying to think about why this is.  Why am I so in love with swimming right now, when last year I was so mehhhh about it.  Why is biking #3 on the list right now when I was enamored with it over the winter?  What is frustrating me so about my body?

And it hit me.  I need to see progress to be happy about what I’m doing.

In swimming right now, I’m progressing in miles.  I’ve taken 15% off my swimming time in 2 months.  This is huge.

In running right now, I’m progressing in feet.  My heart rate is coming down, and my speed is (while definitely not there) coming back.

In biking, I’m progressing in inches.  I made some huge gains over the winter here on the trainer, but I’m kinda topped out and need to progress to turning that into better outdoor riding, which oddly enough, means doing it more than once every few months.

In body composition, inches aren’t even small enough to measure it.  I’ve started to track my calories in and out, and the deficit is pretty small, folks.  Back when I lost a bunch of weight years ago, I had no issue holding a 750-1000 calorie deficit per day when all I had to do was go hit the elliptical for 30 mins.  Now, it takes a little more to fuel an hour on the bike and a lunch hill run, and if I don’t eat enough one day, I’m almost paralyzed by hunger the next.  Going on the model diet is not an option for me, folks, and that’s ok with me!

However, those little deficits lead to me not making a whole lot of progress quickly.  My weight just looks like it’s going nowhere when my fluctuations per week of about 5 lbs are about 500% or more of what I actually expect to see on the scale.  And when I see stalled progress, I get incredibly stressed and want to give up.  So, what’s the solution when you have something you can’t measure with inches?

You get more granular.

I’m moving to daily weighing, recording it, and graphing out my progress, and letting go of the emotional attachment I have of a measurement.  I’ll admit it, I’ll avoid the scale for a day or 3 if I think it’s going to give me a bad number.  I need to get over that.  I may get frustrated that Wednesday is up 2 lbs from Tuesday, but if I can see that trend line going down overall I will know that I’m headed in the right direction.

Eventually, once my fitness comes back in all these disciplines, I’ll need to measure my increases in inches or smaller, so I had better get used to it!

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